"Black Rage"

Lauryn Hill, who at the hands of the current government was forced to served a three-month prison sentence for tax evasion, has released a “sketch” recording of a song called “Black Rage.”

It’s a song she has been performing since at least 2012, but there was no official, publicly available recording of it until last night, according to Slate. She recorded it in her living room.

I suspect the song accurately depicts the views of many in the black community.




In part of the song, I think she gets things right, to a degree. She sings for example:

Black rage is founded on blatant denial
Squeezed economics, subsistence survival
Deafening silence and social control

There is a squeezed, subsistence for many in the black community. And part of it is blatant denial, though it is unclear if Hill or many other members of the black community get the nature of the blatant denial. It comes in the form of minimum wage laws, which make it difficult for many youth in the black community to get that first job. The social control comes, for example, in the form of compulsory school attendance laws, which require students to attend a school where the "education" is a joke.

She is also close to the truth when she sings:

Old time bureaucracy drugging the youth

But, she then goes on to sing:

Free enterprise, is it myth or illusion
Forcing you back into purposed confusion.
Black human trafficking or blood transfusion?
Black rage is founded on these kinds of things.

The lyrics before this all point to controls on black people, but those controls come from government, not free enterprise. The free market system is about freedom. It is the opposite from the ultimate source of the black rage. And while we are discussing this, it should be noted that the rage is not limited to black individuals. Black rage is really a confused (SEE: Urban Primitivism and The Violent Oppressive State: Lessons from the Ferguson, MO Unrest) subset of all those infuriated by government oppression.

Rage without an accurate understanding of the nature of the factors causing the problems related to the rage will never end the problems. The only thing that might happen, without proper understanding, is that one oppressor might be replaced with another oppressor, and that next oppressor may not even allow songs to be sung about the oppression.  And that is a dog bite that may make us all feel bad.

-RW

The song lyrics are here.